Conrad Irwin wrote: > On 03/31/2010 12:31 PM, Victor wrote: >> Hi, now I see... >> >> I've posted a message to the fa.caml newsgroup: >> http://groups.google.com/group/fa.caml/browse_frm/thread/1593e053759d7679 >> >> hopefully somebody will volunteer to fix the issues, thus >> saving the human resources for better tasks. > > While I'll no doubt regret saying this, I am happy to fix some of these > bugs. With the majority of these it's harder to decide "should we fix" > and "how should we fix" rather than actually being hard to implement. > > What I don't want to do is fix things to find that it then gets > immediately re-implemented in PHP, which seems to be what people want.
I don't think "reimplement texvc in PHP" is anyone's goal as such. The real goal is "make texvc actively maintained". Reimplementing it in PHP would be one way to achieve that, since we have plenty of PHP programmers who could then maintain it. Finding some person or people who know OCaml and are willing to do the work would be another route to the same end. In general, there's a form of decision paralysis common to volunteer projects, particularly ones relying on skilled volunteers. Basically, there are two solutions to a problem, X and Y: Person A says "I can try to do X, but I don't want to spend the time if we're just going to do Y instead." Person B says "I can try to do Y, but I don't want to spend the time if we're just going to do X instead." No-one else wants to commit to either X or Y, since they want to keep the other option open in case A or B doesn't succeed with their favored approach after all. End result is that neither X nor Y actually gets done. There are two ways out of this situation: either the project needs to commit to one option and make sure it gets done, or A and B need to accept the risk that they might end up doing redundant work. Ironically, the meta-decision on whether to commit to one approach or try both can also get suck in a similar dilemma on a higher level. Going back to the concrete issue here, I'd personally recommend trying both _for now_. In particular, rewriting texvc in Python or PHP, as a MediaWiki extension, would seem like good GSoC project even if it didn't actually end up being adopted into MW core in the end. Meanwhile, fixing at least the simplest and most critical issues in the current OCaml implementation would also be of immediate value, even if that implementation might possibly end up being replaced at some point off in the future. I wouldn't necessarily recommend going immediately for the more tricky issues, or the ones with lower short-term benefit per effort, but I'm sure there must be some low-hanging fruit ready to be picked by anyone who's simply familiar with the language. By autumn, we ought to have some idea how much, if any, progress has been made with each approach. At that point, we should be better able to decide whether to commit to one approach or the other, and if so, which. I should also note that, as long as one implementation doesn't _completely_ supersede the other in every way, there would probably be people interested in using each of them if they were available as optional extensions. In particular, I'm sure there are people who have access to Python but haven't managed to set up OCaml -- and I wouldn't be completely surprised if the opposite turned out to be also true. Of course, that's just my opinion as a random occasional contributor. Take it with as much salt as you think appropriate. -- Ilmari Karonen _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
